


we were born sick (you heard them say it)

by theyellowumbrella



Category: Emmerdale
Genre: Gen, brief jebbie mention, brief vanity mention !, but apart from that it is basically All noah/aaron, mentions of Jackson, spoiler alert: he's gay, they're both gay, vague mentions of homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-15
Updated: 2018-02-15
Packaged: 2019-03-18 17:39:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13686558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theyellowumbrella/pseuds/theyellowumbrella
Summary: Noah has some realisations about himself and confides in Aaron about them.





	we were born sick (you heard them say it)

**Author's Note:**

> well this is the gay noah fic that literally Nobody asked for and i wrote anyway because i love my gay son. originally this was going to be a whole ass Thing with parts of the holiday written and josh was gonna be like. an actual Character, but i'm too lazy to do that so have this instead
> 
> this is dedicated to caitlin because she loves gay noah and i had to settle a fight with Something, so !

“Um… Aaron?”

Aaron’s head snaps up, focus taken off of his phone for the first time in a while. He instinctively looks across the room to where Moses and Johnny are playing, checking them over for any issues before turning back to Noah, who’s standing in the doorway, scratching at his neck.

“Yeah, mate?” he asks, giving Noah a small smile. “You alright?”

“Erm, yeah, I just …” Noah starts, but his voice trails off. He walks into the room slowly, as if any sudden movements will spook himself and make him run away. “I had a question. For you.”

Aaron can practically feel his nervousness in the way he’s bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet, hands fiddling with the hem of his top. He looks about ready to vomit any second, face a sort of off-white colour that’s nearing green.

“Yeah, okay,” he says. He nods towards the chair in front of him as a gesture for Noah to sit down, setting his phone down on the table. Noah approaches timidly, sitting up in the chair completely straight. Aaron sighs, and decides to take pity on him. “I’m not gonna bite, y’know.”

Noah forces out a laugh, short and clipped and abrupt, before redirecting his gaze to the table in front of him. He starts staring intensely at it, almost as if he’s studying the splinters in the wood, just so he doesn’t have to make eye contact. There’s such a direct contrast between this Noah — shy, withdrawn, scared to even breathe — and the one he normally sees, the one that he was speaking to earlier, who’s usually cheeky and chatty and always up for a laugh. There’s something there that reminds Aaron of himself, even if just for a minute, that sets him on edge.

“So,” he says, giving Noah what he hopes is a warm smile. “What’s up?” Nothing. “It’s not Liv, is it?”

“No!” Noah’s quick to respond, eyes going wide in panic, as if he thinks he’s somehow gotten Liv into trouble for something she’s not even done. Aaron lets himself have a little laugh at that, at the fact that that’s clearly the person his little sister is.

“Noah, what’s wrong, mate?” he asks. Still nothing. “I can’t help if you don’t talk.”

He briefly wonders when he started sounding like one of his therapists, but pushes it to the back of his mind in favour of focusing on the situation at hand. No use dwelling on it.

“Yeah, I know,” Noah says eventually, gnawing on his thumbnail. He goes quiet again and Aaron’s scared he’s never going to get to hear this question when Noah suddenly comes out with, “You’re gay, right?”

Well. That’s not what he was expecting to come out of his mouth, but. He figures it’s probably some question about Charity and Vanessa, something he’s too nervous to ask them himself. It doesn’t really explain why he’s so scared to ask, but then again, Noah always was among the most innocent and withdrawn Dingles (a feat he thought impossible for one of Charity’s children).

“Er, I am, yeah.”

Noah spends a few seconds studying the table before he speaks again. “How did you … how did you know?” he asks, voice small. “That you were … y’know. Gay.”

Oh. Well, he wasn’t expecting that one. It could still be a question about his mum, but Aaron doubts it. The anxiety makes sense now, the way he didn’t really seem to want to ask. His heart aches for Noah in that moment, so small and scared.

“Oh,” he says, because he’s not really sure what he’s meant to. Is he meant to tell him the whole sordid tale? Is he meant to ask him what he’s thinking, how he’s feeling? Is he meant to ask him why and go along with it when he inevitably says it’s for a friend? “Um…”

“Forget about it,” Noah says all of a sudden, standing up from the table so fast he knocks his knees against it. “It was stupid. Pretend I never asked.”

“Noah —”

“Honestly, Aaron, just forget I ever said anything.”

“Noah, just — sit down, will ya?” Aaron says, exasperated. 

Noah stops where he is, and Aaron can almost see him weighing up the pros and cons in his mind, battling out whether or not he should stay or run. In the end, he must lose against himself, because he lets out a shaky sigh and sits back down. He refuses to look Aaron in the eye, but at least he seems settled in his seat, not likely to flee any minute.

“So… what? You think you’re gay?”

“No!” Noah exclaims, far too fast and defensive to be true. He pinches the bridge of his nose with his thumb and index finger, eyes squeezed shut, as if he thinks that if he wishes hard enough he’ll will this into all being a dream. “I mean… yes. No. Sort of — I don’t  _ know. _ ”

“Well, that’s alright,” Aaron says in what he hopes is a comforting voice. “I mean, not knowing. It’s alright to be confused.”

Noah doesn’t say anything in response, instead just looks like he wants the ground to swallow him up so he doesn’t have to keep having this conversation. The only distraction from the silence between them is the sound of Moses and Johnny babbling away between each other in the corner, playing happily with their toys without a clue what’s happening across the room.

“Y’know, you can talk to your mum about this,” he suggests. “Or Vanessa.”

“No way,” Noah says firmly, as if he’s never been more sure of anything in his life. “I’d rather die.”

“Not as if they’re gonna chuck you out, is it?”

“That’s not the point.”

He sighs. “Yeah. Yeah, I know.” He feels bad for Noah, he does, but he’s pretty sure any attempts he makes to comfort him will only make things worse. “Or you could speak to Debbie?”

Noah furrows his brow. “Debbie?” he asks. “Why would I ask Debbie? What does she know about it?”

Aaron thinks of another time — of a vicar’s niece and a bent policeman and a girl on the run, of Debbie being so young and broken that she was willing to go down for life just to keep the one she loved safe. Noah would have been so young — in fact, Aaron’s not even sure that he knew Debbie existed at that point — that there’s no way he could know.

“No reason,” he says, pushing down the memories. It must be worse for Debbie, he reckons; the remembering.

Noah seems to accept that, that there’s no more to the story than what’s already been said, and even if he doesn’t, he says no more of it. He fiddles with his sleeves, looking for any distraction possible from the conversation.

“I don’t want to talk to Mum or Vanessa,” he says. “Just you. And I mean, I don’t even want to talk to you, really. No offense.”   


Aaron laughs. “No, it’s alright.”

“So?” Noah asks. “How did you know, then?”

Aaron lets out a breath, wracking his mind for an appropriate answer. It’s all so muddled in his head, he can barely make sense of it himself, never mind expecting Noah to. And he wants to tell him the truth — the whole truth, the ugly truth — he does, but then he looks at Noah, so terrified and upset and shy, and he can’t bear the thought of scaring him any more.

“I dunno,” he says instead, giving him a small shrug. “Just … always fancied blokes, I suppose.”

Noah looks up. “What, and it was that easy?”

He scoffs. “No, of course not.”

He doesn’t like thinking about it, not for too long. Fleeting thoughts, flashes of memories, he can handle. They’re almost nice, comforting — like if he thinks about Jackson only for a few minutes, then he’s back with him for a few minutes. And then he gets to tuck him away back in his box, shoved back to the dark corners of his mind for another few months, hidden away where it doesn’t stab at him like a knife.

But this … it’s like a white hot pain, stabbing at him over and over. He knows Noah isn’t doing it on purpose, isn’t trying to dredge up bad memories, and he doesn’t resent him for it, but it’s hard not to let it show. He pushes through though, grins and bears it as much as he can, because Noah’s scared and vulnerable and he needs him to be strong.

“You remember Jackson, yeah?” he says, and Noah’s eyes go all soft, like he’s sorry for even making Aaron remember. It warms Aaron’s heart, his childlike innocence. Gives him hope.

“Yeah,” Noah says. “Well, not really, but I remember — yeah.”

He’s not sure what Noah was going to say then, but he doesn’t think he wants to. Wouldn’t make a difference, in the end. It never does.

“Well that just… y’know, made it obvious for me. First time I’d had proper feelings for a lad. Made a right mess of it, but it was worth it.” Noah’s gone quiet at that, but there’s something about this silence that makes Aaron smile. It’s familiar, the way his cheeks have reddened.  _ This _ he can deal with. “Why? There a lad you got your eye on?”

He flushes bright red, unable to hide the embarrassment from his face. Aaron grins at him, at the way he’s so easily flustered. It’s nice, to be able to talk openly with him like this — he never could have imagined doing this when he was Noah’s age. The closest he got was a conversation through tears, crouched on the top of the stairs with a beaten half to death Paddy while he tried to convince him not to run away.

“Not really,” he says, keeping his eyes on the table. “I mean… there was this boy. On holiday. But it wasn’t — we didn’t …  _ do _ anything.”

“But you liked him?”

Noah half-shrugs. “I think so. At first I thought it was just like, looking up to him, ‘cause he was fifteen and he was dead cool, but then …”

“Then?” Aaron pushes.

“We were hanging out at the beach with these two girls from the hotel, and he pulled one of them. I didn’t like it.” The words come out strained, like he’s having to physically push them out. “But it wasn’t about the girl — I didn’t care about her. Can’t even remember her name.”

“What about him?” he asks. “What was his name?”

“Josh.” It comes out all dreamy, his eyes glazing over, like he still hasn’t shaken him after all this time. There’s something so familiar about it, about the way his voice goes soft, that tugs at Aaron’s heartstrings.

“I never even used to know that gay was a thing,” Noah says. “I mean, I did — I always knew you had boyfriends instead of girlfriends — but I never knew it had a name. Don’t think I realised until I heard the lads at school taking the mick out of someone.”

Noah’s much more relaxed now, much more at ease with himself. He’s still fiddling with his hands nervously like he’s not sure what he’s meant to do with them, but he’s slumped back in his seat and he’s finally making some semblance of eye contact.

Moses comes toddling over, clinging onto his elephant with his teeth and holding a toy truck in his hands. He raises his arms towards Noah and lets out a little whine, impatiently bouncing up and down on the spot. Noah hefts him up onto his lap without a second thought, settling him automatically. He bounces his knee up and down gently, smiling when Moses giggles, and pries his elephant out of his mouth, setting it down on the table in front of him.

There’s something about the scene that has Aaron blinking back tears. He’s not sure what it is that gets to him; maybe it’s the relationship that Noah has with Moses, the reminder of all the years missed with Liv; maybe it’s the softness that Moses brought out in Noah as soon as he came up to them; maybe it’s the way he sees himself in Noah, reclusive and distant until someone he loves comes along, and then he’s all too much.

Whatever it is, Aaron knows one thing for certain: he wants to keep Noah safe. He wants to protect him, make sure he doesn’t go down the same path Aaron did; all of that torment, that anger, that awful, awful self-hatred … he wants to make sure Noah never feels even ounce of that.

“Noah,” he says, snatching back Noah’s attention from Moses, who’s now happily driving his truck along the table and pretending it’s the motorway, supplying appropriate car noises while he does so.

“Yeah?”

“It’ll, erm … it’ll all be alright, y’know?” He’s never been good at giving advice, but he hopes this is good enough to tide Noah over for the time being. “Really, if you are gay, it’s not the end of the world.”

Noah smiles back at him. “Hope so.” His eyes are just that bit too bright and his smile stretched too thin, like he wants to be happy, wants to be hopeful, but doesn’t know how, so he’s putting it on for Aaron’s sake. It’s sweet, really.

He turns away, clearly done with the conversation, and continues playing with Moses, taking the truck out of his hand and swooping it in the air. Aaron watches in fond amusement as Johnny comes over and Noah engages with him just as much, tickling at his ribs until he’s squealing with laughter.

It’s a sight to behold, really — Aaron only hopes what’s left of Noah’s innocence isn’t snatched from him at such a young age like his own was. It would be a shame, to ruin something — some _ one _ — so good, so innocent, over something so trivial.

**Author's Note:**

> speak to me on tumblr! noahdingles.tumblr.com


End file.
